An Overdue Victory for Bonded Labor in Orissa

In the customary ‘bartan system’ usually persons from lower castes performed their services for upper caste families with no cash remuneration.

India’s National Human Rights Commission announced this week that the eastern state of Orissa has outlawed a form of bonded labor, known as the “bartan (vessel) system,” a move that comes only about 35 years after India made forced labor illegal.

The bartan system is a form of customary practice through which barbers, washermen and other workers, usually lower caste, performed their services for upper caste families whenever required. In return, instead of cash remuneration, they would get compensated in 15 kilos or rice or wheat a year.

The move marks a victory for people of several occupations, as well as for activist Baghambar Pattanaik, who has been leading a fight against the practice for at least a decade.

Orissa took the action, announced in an order to government officials last month, because of a complaint filed by Mr. Pattanaik in 2007 with the National Human Rights Commission. After a lengthy back-and-forth with the state, the commission agreed earlier this year with Mr. Pattanaik that the customary practice was a form of bonded labor as defined in national legislation in 1976, and told the state government so in talks in January.

In February, the state government of Orissa instructed local authorities to discourage and take stringent action against those indulging in the practice.

The services rendered weren’t restricted to shaving or washing clothes, and were linked to practices under India’s caste hierarchy as well. The commission said that in many cases, the barbers and washermen were forced to wash the feet of guests during social ceremonies or asked to remove plates containing leftovers—an act considered unclean by upper caste people.

If they refused to comply, the workers were often “socially boycotted, humiliated, publicly harassed or even beaten up by the upper castes,” said Mr. Pattanaik.

Mr. Pattanaik, a high school teacher till 2002, resigned from his job and joined a movement against the age-old practice after some people came to him with complaints of being harassed or ill-treated in this way.

According to the Bonded Labor System (Abolition) Act, bonded labor is any kind of work or agreement a person has entered into out of force or reasons stemming from social obligations, debts incurred by ancestors to the family or because of his or her caste, and is illegal.

India’s commission disagreed with a previous decision taken in April 2004, by a department of the Orissa government, which did not find the barbers and washermen working in rural areas in this fashion to be bonded labor.

A.K. Garg, an official at the National Human Rights Commission, said the problem was not in the law but in the state’s interpretation of the existing law. Earlier, the state government considered that these laborers were rendering services of their free will, explained Mr. Garg.

But after an inquiry by the commission into complaints in the practice, it was clear that it qualified as bonded labor, said Mr. Garg.

Mr. Garg said that the point to understand is that bonded labor is not just limited to “physically compelling a person to work,” but can include other sorts of pressure as well.

“Any services rendered due to financial compulsions or behavior repulsive to human dignity is a violation of the law,” said Mr. Garg.

Mr. Garg says people’s mindsets will still have to change—what they were doing was always punishable under the law but they still did it. But at least now when people make complaints regarding the bartan system, which the government wouldn’t accept earlier, they now have a chance of being investigated.

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